"The old mole continues to dig, but he is blind and does not know where he is coming from or going to; he digs in circles. And those who cannot or will not trust to Providence must do their best to understand him, and by doing so help him on his way."
(Lucio Magri)

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Prophet Davis

"An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternate, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. I am claiming, in other words, that Wovoka offers us a neo-catastrophist epistemology for reinterpreting Western history from the standpoint of certain terminal features of the approaching millennial landscape. He invites us to reopen that history from the vantage point of an already visible future when sprawl, garbage, addiction, violence, and simulation will have overwhelmed every vital life-space west of the Rockies. This is Turnerian history, if you will, stripped down to its ultimate paranoia: the West become Los Angeles. For those who retain the Ghost Dance tradition, this end point is also paradoxically the end point of renewal and restoration. It is through this black hole that the West will disappear into the singularity of catastrophe, only to emerge, on the other side, with streams full of salmon and plains black with bison."

Mike Davis, 'White People Are Only a Bad Dream...' (1999), in Dead Cities, New York: The New Press, 2003, 31.

Lord of God. The political unconscious as angry native American 'fetus in your neck', and who will fight it... Tony Curtis! Will have to think long and hard to prolong this potlatch in the appropriate manner...

The time-line where Ghost Dance in its militarist form meets Christianity in its militarist form is one of the paradigms of our reality.

And it hits on the most important point of any future oriented philosophy ( "prophecy " ): that there is a time of paradox where the keys to the doors of the past no longer fit the doors of the future.